Monthly Archives: November 2015

We know more and more about the financial cost of cybercrime, but there has been very little work on its emotional cost. David Modic and I decided to investigate. We wanted to empirically test whether there are emotional repercussions to becoming a victim of fraud (Yes, there are). We wanted to compare emotional and financial impact across different categories of fraud and establish a ranking list (And we did). An interesting, although not surprising, finding was that in every tested category the victim’s perception of emotional impact outweighed the reported financial loss.

A victim may think that they will still be able to recover their money, if not their pride. That really depends on what type of fraud they facilitated. If it is auction fraud, then their chances of recovery are comparatively higher than in bank fraud – we found that 26% of our sample would attempt to recover funds lost in a fraudulent auction and approximately half of them were reimbursed (look at this presentation). There is considerable evidence that banks are not very likely to believe someone claiming to be a victim of, say, identity theft and by extension bank fraud. Thus, when someone ends up out of pocket, they will likely also go through a process of secondary victimisation where they will be told they broke some small-print rule like having the same pin for two of their bank cards or not using the bank’s approved anti-virus software, and are thus not eligible for any refund and it is all their own fault, really.

This paper complements and extends our earlier work on the costs of cybercrime, where we show that the broader economic costs to society of cybercrime – such as loss of confidence in online shopping and banking – also greatly exceed the amounts that cybercriminals actually manage to steal.

A lot of people are starting to ask about the security and privacy implications of the “Internet of Things”. Once there’s software in everything, what will go wrong? We’ve seen a botnet recruiting CCTV cameras, and a former Director of GCHQ recently told a parliamentary committee that it might be convenient if a suspect’s car could be infected with malware that would cause it to continually report its GPS position. (The new InvestigatoryPowersBill will give the police and the spooks the power to hack any device they want.)

So here is the video of a talk I gave on The Internet of Bad Things to the Virus Bulletin conference. As the devices around us become smarter they will become less loyal, and it’s not just about malware (whether written by cops or by crooks). We can expect all sorts of novel business models, many of them exploitative, as well as some downright dishonesty: the recent Volkswagen scandal won’t be the last.

But dealing with pervasive malware in everything will demand new approaches. Our approach to the Internet of Bad Things includes our new Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, which will let us monitor bad things online at the kind of scale that will be required.

In this thesis I provide a detailed presentation of template attacks, which are considered the most powerful kind of side-channel attacks, and I present several methods for implementing and evaluating this attack efficiently in different scenarios.

These contributions may allow evaluation labs to perform their evaluations faster, show that we can determine almost perfectly an 8-bit target value even when this value is manipulated by a single LOAD instruction (may be the best published results of this kind), and show how to cope with differences across devices, among others.

A month ago I wrote about the presence of route objects for undelegated IPv4 address space within the RIPE database (strictly I should say RIPE NCC — the body who looks after this database).

The folks at RIPE NCC removed a number of these dubious route objects which had been entered by AS204224.

And they were put straight back again!

This continues to this day — it looks to me as if once the RIPE NCC staff go home for the evening the route objects are resurrected.

So for AS204224 (CJSC Mashzavod-Marketing-Servis) you can (at the moment of writing) find route objects for four /19s and two /21s which have a creation times between 17:53 and 17:55 this evening (2 November). This afternoon (in RIPE NCC working hours) there were no such route objects.

As an aside: as well as AS204224 I see route objects for undelegated space (these are all more recent than my original blog article) from:

I’d like to give a detailed account of the creation and deletion of the AS204224 route objects, but I don’t believe that there’s a public archive of RIPE database snapshots (you can find the latest snapshot taken at about 03:45 each morning at ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase, but if you don’t download it that day then it’s gone!).

However, I have been collecting copies of the database for the past few days and the creation times for the route objects are:

There are two conclusions to draw from this: perhaps the AS204224 people only come out at night and dutifully delete their route objects when the sun rises before repeating the activity the following night (sounds like one of Grimm’s fairy tales doesn’t it?).

The alternative, less magical explanation, is that the staff at RIPE NCC are playing “whack-a-mole” INSIDE THEIR OWN DATABASE! (and although they work weekends, they go home early on Friday afternoons!)